Still Life With Murder (11 page)

“My word.”

“He boards horses, too,” Cook said, cocking his head toward the stable. “Between that and the opium and his cut of the wagering, plus three dollars a week for every bed he fills and payments from the, uh…the women who solicit in his establishment, he don’t do half bad for himself.”

“If you know about the prostitution and the gambling, why don’t you arrest him for it?” The answer was so evident that she answered before he could. “He’s paying you off.”

“Not me personally—they don’t trust my kind to play bag man. Let’s just say I’ve been told to look the other way. It’s not too hard. Flynn don’t want no trouble, and he’s careful not to attract any. Tell you one thing, he’s none too pleased over the little drama that unfolded in his alleyway last night. Bad for business, having us coppers sniffin’ around, ’specially given the clientele he attracts.”

“Did
he
see anything last night?”

“Not much. Like I said, he was down in the pit most of the night, but he did come upstairs once or twice to sell gong to—”

“Gong?”

“Opium. There was a handful of pipe fiends came and went, but William Hewitt was there all night. Must have gotten good and boiled on the stuff, to have done what he done.”

“Are you absolutely sure he’ll be convicted?”

“I’d stake my badge on it—and you can go back and tell that to Mr. August Hewitt. What’s more, I’ll be there cheering them on when they string him up, ’cause it’s no worse than what he deserves. As for the money, I certainly
would
have been a fool to refuse it, and not just because they don’t pay me enough to begin with. Would have gotten Captain Baxter nervous as a cat if I’d turned it down. He would have wondered why, maybe worried that I was fixing to finger him for accepting payoffs. He never has liked having me around, uppity mick that I am. I’m sure a high-reaching little lace curtain colleen like yourself knows how that feels.”

Nell didn’t bother responding to that, “lace curtain” being something of an epithet among Boston’s Irish. “Why
does
he have you around, then?”

“It was the chief’s idea to have Irishmen policing their own, but Baxter thinks of us as foreign riffraff, and he’s been achin’ to can me ever since I got promoted—and me with a brand new house and a wife I happen to worship, who deserves better than to end up out on the street. Tell me, Miss Sweeney, have you never compromised yourself even a little bit, never done something you wouldn’t want to admit even in confession, ’cause it was the only way to make your life a little more bearable?”

She looked away, the bitter air stinging her cheeks.

Soberly he said, “There’s none of us that are blameless. Yes, I took August Hewitt’s money, and I’ll take the bonus once his son’s sentenced. But it makes no difference in terms of how I treat this case. After seventeen years on the force, I know a guilty man when I see him, and William Hewitt is as guilty as they come.”

“He just doesn’t seem…” She shook her head. “Something about him…”

“The damnedest people…Begging your pardon, miss. The strangest people turn out to be murderers, folks you’d never suspect. Given a good enough reason, just about anybody could do the deed, even you or me. That don’t make it right, though, and when it happens, it’s got to be punished.”

“Yes, but if you’d talked to him…”

“And whose fault is it that I wasn’t able to, eh? All he’d tell us was his name, and that turned out to be hooey. Only reason he talked to you is ’cause his father was clever enough to send a bonny little thing like yourself. Knew his son’s weakness, he did.”

Inside the house, men shouted and cheered.

“Come on,” he said. “I know them boys in there. If we wait much longer, they’ll be too soused to talk to us—or rather, to me. You’re to hold that quick tongue of yours and let me do the questioning.”

A ramshackle wooden staircase crawled up the outside of the house in back, starting between the cellar entrance and the other, blue-painted door. Landings on the second and third floors provided access to the house through doors with cracked windowpanes; a window on the second floor was half boarded-up. There were footprints around the bottom and on its snow-covered treads.

“Watch the ice on the stoop,” Cook said as he opened the blue door, ushering her through a cluttered little vestibule and into a kitchen redolent with frying onions. A tall woman in an apron and head rag stood at the cook stove; she didn’t turn when they came in.

Cook doffed his hat to her back. “Evening…Kathleen, is it?”

“That’s right,” she said without turning around. Her Irish-accented voice was thin and girlish, in contrast to her sturdy build and big, efficient hands.

“Where’s your da this evening, Kathleen?”

Her shoulders twitched. “Saw him headin’ upstairs earlier. Ain’t seen him come down.”

“Your boarders sound like they’re feeling their oats,” Cook observed. “What is it this evening? Cards or chuck?”

“Chuck. Drawing room.” Kathleen glanced over her shoulder, her gaze lighting with interest, and perhaps a touch of envy, on Nell’s fine coat and hat. The girl had pleasant features rendered homely by a raw abrasion on her left cheek, surrounded by discolored swelling. The bruising stood out bluish-purple against her milky skin; it had happened within the last day or two.

“Follow me,” Cook murmured as he guided Nell down a long hallway, the boisterous voices growing louder as they neared the front of the house.

“What happened to that girl’s face?” Nell whispered.

“I asked her last night. She claims she slipped on the ice, but I suspect it’s her father’s handiwork. He’s a hardchaw if ever there was one.”

To their right was a staircase to the second floor; to their left, two doorways, the first of which he gestured Nell through. She found herself in a dismal little back parlor furnished with two threadbare couches and a scarred old leather chaise lounge. A blanket-covered mattress occupied the middle of the floor. Faded old paper imprinted with cabbage roses was curling off the walls.

“This is the hop joint, or what passes for one,” he said, gesturing with the bowler. “Told you there wasn’t much to see. Flynn keeps the opium and pipes and what-not locked up in there.” He pointed to a built-in cupboard against the wall. “Sailors acquire the habit in foreign ports, and they’re willing to pay to satisfy it. There’s others that come here besides them, like Hewitt, but it usually doesn’t pick up here till nine or ten at night.”

“It’s chilly in here,” Nell said.

“Flynn keeps the windows cracked open for air—otherwise the whole house would stink of burning gong.”

Through the two partially open windows, hung with yellowish, tied-back lace curtains, Nell had a pretty good view of the alley she’d just been in, and the brick building next door. A rattle of dice came from beyond the wall to the front drawing room, followed by roars and whoops. Crossing to a pair of pocket doors, Cook yanked them open.

Silence swept through the smoke-hazed drawing room as its inhabitants—perhaps a dozen men and one woman—looked toward Nell and Detective Cook standing in the wide doorway. Most of the men were gathered around a chuck-a-luck table scattered with coins and crumpled bills—roughly dressed sailors with the exception of two who appeared to be, not boarders, but gentlemen seeking “free-and-easy” diversion, as William Hewitt had last night. Another well-dressed young man sat in the corner with the woman—a painted hussy—perched on his lap, a silver flask in her hand. The air was thick with stale sweat, staler gin and cheap tobacco.

Cook held up a badge. “Detective Colin Cook, Boston Police. Any of you jack-tars around last night when that fella got his throat cut in the alleyway?”

A couple of the men shook their heads; most looked away, exchanging sneers, rolling cigarettes, fiddling with their money. One bearded behemoth with overgrown black hair sprouting from beneath a leather cap ogled Nell while gulping whiskey from a bottle.

“You. Noonan.” Cook pointed to the giant in the leather cap. “Where were you around midnight last night?”

“At church,” Noonan said, still watching Nell, “prayin’ for a Bible-totin’ angel to come save me from my wicked ways. Looks like my prayers was answered.”

When the chuckles had died down, Cook said, “We arrested a fella last night—tall, black haired. Calls himself William
Toussaint. He’d been kicking the gong around in there.” The detective nodded toward the back parlor. “Anybody notice him?”

There were some shrugs, some shakes of the head; for the most part, the inquiry was simply ignored.

“You’re new here, aren’t you?” Cook addressed this to the hussy on the young swell’s lap, a buxom creature with washed-out yellow hair whose face powder didn’t quite conceal her flaccid jowls and crepey neck. The lace trim on the bodice of her too-tight green satin dress was coming loose, as if it could no longer bear up under the strain.

“That’s right,” she said, her gaze wavering slightly as she handed the silver flask back to the young dandy.

“She’s Molly’s friend Pearl,” someone offered, blanching when Noonan turned his flat-eyed glare on him.

“Where
is
Molly?” the detective a asked; no answer. “Was she around last night?” A few shrugs, some whispers. To Nell, Cook said, “Molly works out of here almost every night—knows all the regulars. There’s other girls that come and go—they pick up the overflow on busy nights—but Molly’s always around. So…Pearl, is it? Were
you
here last night?

She hesitated. Finally: “I didn’t see nothin’.”

“I know you girls like to ply your trade to them with the deepest pockets. Toussaint gives the appearance of a man of means. I don’t suppose you cozied up to him.”

Noonan turned to look at the whore over his bottle as he took another swig.

She held the bearded sailor’s gaze for a moment, her crimsoned lips pressed together like a knife slit, then looked back at Cook. “Can’t say as I noticed him.”

“No? He was in there all night.” Cook nodded toward the back parlor.

“I spent most of the night standin’ round out back with the other girls.”

To the group as a whole, Cook said, “The fella that got killed, Ernest Tulley—was he around much last night?”

A few men exchanged looks. Someone spat on the floor.

“I’m sure you all knew him, at least by sight,” Cook said. “He was a deckhand on a Liverpool packet ship called the
Evangeline
. Mr. Flynn tells me he rents a bed here whenever his ship’s in port. I find it hard to believe no one saw him last night.”

“I’m pretty sure I
smelt
him,” said a sailor smoking a cabbage leaf cigar.

That statement was met with a flurry of laughter.

The man who’d spoken had purplish streaks under each eye and a badly distended nose. “What happened to you?” Cook asked.

The sailor tapped his cigar onto his trouser leg and rubbed the ashes into the wool. “Met with an accident.”

“And you?” Cook pointed to another man in back, cradling a bandaged hand as if to hide it.

“Accident.”

“Seem to be a lot of them around here,” Cook observed dryly. “Anybody know whether Tulley and Toussaint exchanged words at all?”

“They didn’t.” This from a swarthy young sailor with blue-black hair.

“Shut your mouth, you ignorant wop,” someone hissed, more in a warning tone, it seemed to Nell, than in anger.

“Castelli don’t know nothin’,” Noonan said. “It was Rat Night last night. He was down in the pit with everybody else.”

“All night?” Cook asked.

“That’s right,” Noonan said.

“No it ain’t.” Castelli said something to Noonan in Italian, punctuating the rebuke with a brusque hand gesture Nell had never seen before. “They didn’t talk, Tulley and that guy they
arrested,” Castelli told Cook. “Far as I could tell, they didn’t even know each other.”

“Anybody else have any observations from last night they’d care to share?”

Noonan gave the dice cage attached to the chuck table a lazy spin. Its clattering was the only sound in the room.

Cook shook his head disgustedly. “Does it mean nothing to you that one of your own took a knife in the throat for no good reason at all?”

“That fat, miserable yellow jacket weren’t one of us,” Noonan growled, to murmurs of agreement from his companions. “You ast me, he had it comin’ to him, and ain’t a man among us’ll argue with that.”

“Why?” Nell asked, ignoring Detective Cook’s glare. “Because he was southern?”
Yellow Jacket
had been Yankee slang for a Confederate soldier.

Every face in the room turned toward her. Noonan looked amused at her temerity. “Ain’t none of us gonna stab a man in the throat just fer that, sweet pea. War’s over, last I heard.”

More for some than for others, Nell knew. There were men whose scars—those you could see and those you couldn’t—were terribly slow to heal. “Why did he have it coming to him, then?” she asked.

Noonan gave her a big, stump-toothed grin. “You come on upstairs with me, I’ll explain it to you—nice and slow and easy, just the way you sweet little angels like it.”

“That’s enough of that,” Cook protested over the ensuing snickers and hoots. Drawing Nell away by her arm, he said, “Any of you jackanapes feel like talking—without an audience—you’ll find me at Station Two on Williams Court.”

The detective didn’t escort her outside, but upstairs to the second floor, explaining that he wanted to find Seamus Flynn
and get the name of every man who was here last night. “I wish you’d held your tongue, like I told you. They were starting to talk.” He pounded a fist on the nearest door off the dimly lit hallway. “Flynn?” He swung the door open. It slammed against a cot, one of eight crammed together in a dreary room strewn with clothing, rucksacks and the occasional battered sea chest.

“Does it matter so much whether they talk or not?” she asked. “I thought you were just going through the motions. Which is just as well, because those men downstairs obviously loathed Earnest Tulley. Why should they help you convict his killer?”

He glared at her as he stalked to a door at the end of the hall, she struggling to keep up. “It would look better, is all, if I could produce a body to put on the stand. Baxter would just love to see me come up empty-handed.”